Computers and other related technology pervade modern business enterprises as well as other organizations. Businesses utilize computers to improve the productivity of their employees and manage operations. Today businesses rely on a plurality of performance data derived from enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software as well as spreadsheets and other data files. Unfortunately, each system defines and presents data in a different manner. Moreover, each system provides information on different aspects of a business operation. Hence, business professionals must expend a large amount of time and energy to consolidate and digest great quantities of data to determine what is important to its business and its future goals. Key performance indicators can facilitate providing a business decision maker with a consolidated understanding of company performance. This allows executives and decision makers to keep track of the pulse of business and act quickly to take advantage of opportunities to propel business forward toward established goals and objectives
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are customizable business metrics utilized to present the status and trends in an organization in an easily cognizable manner. Once a business or other organization defines its mission or objectives, KPIs can be employed to measure progress toward those objectives. In general, each KPI can have a target value and an actual value. The target value represents a quantitative goal or object that is considered key or critical to the success of a business or organization. Thus, target values can be quite different for distinct businesses as their goals and focus is often dissimilar. For example, business can have KPIs concerning sales, net profit, and debt ratio, while a school may define a KPI related to graduation rate. Of course, the target value can change over time but is for the most part a stable value. The actual value is the value that fluctuates often based on the actions and performance of a business. Actual values can be compared to target values to determine a business' health or progress toward the target value. Thus, KPIs are advantageous in that they provide a clear description of organizational goals and distill vast quantities of data down to a single value that can be utilized to continuously monitor business performance and its progress toward organization benchmarks.
KPIs and scorecards (i.e., groups of KPIs) are not a novel business concept. Business decision makers have been utilizing KPI applications for some time now to measure the health of their business. KPI applications conventionally contain logic expressions for calculating the value of the KPI. These applications can then retrieve specific data specified by the expression and execute the logic to determine the KPI value. Subsequently, such calculated data can be displayed in a convenient manner such as presenting the KPI value, the threshold and some graphical indication of performance based on the value and the threshold. For example, if the value is above the threshold then a graphical representation of thumbs up can be displayed. Alternatively, if the value is below the threshold then a graphical representation of thumbs downs can be displayed.
Development of a KPI application includes several steps. First, a user or organization is queried to determine which KPIs they would like to be implemented in accordance with their mission and goals. Next, the functions or expressions that produce the KPIs are determined based on knowledge of the relevant database schema and specified in a specific API application. This enables the application to interact directly with a database based on its knowledge of the database schema to retrieve data necessary to calculate KPI values.